Past-Due Decorations, Apartment Filth, etc.
I wrote a joke while I was driving to work yesterday. Wanna hear it? OK:
Did you see the story about the world’s longest baby being born? Yeah, its birthday is January 25 through 27.
Isn’t that hilarious? …Hello?
Anyway, there’s a house around the corner from us, where the Christmas tree is still standing in the living room. On February 2! And the owners even plug-in the lights every evening. Oh man, that really turns my ass inside-out… I don’t know why, but it does.
When I lived alone in Atlanta I had a Christmas tree one year, and left it in the corner of my living room/kitchen (that’s right, living room/kitchen) until sometime after baseball season had started.
I remember, because my brother came for a visit while that dried-up husk was still in there, and we went to a Braves game. He was howling in protest at my past-due decoration, calling it a fire hazard, so I grabbed the thing and every needle instantly abandoned every limb. There was a ssssh sound, and the “tree” was nothing but a tumbleweed. It weighed roughly two ounces. Heh.
But I didn’t turn on the lights after, say, January 15. So, even during my darkest days I wasn’t as bad as those assmasters around the corner. I feel like staging an intervention. I’m sure Half-Shirt would participate; he’s probably beside himself over there, mumbling and looking out windows.
The world’s worst, however, was a house in Burbank, California. It was/is on Hollywood Way, across the street from the post office, and they kept their place decorated for all holidays year-round. It was insanity.
They had Christmas lights, plastic eggs hanging from the trees, a jack-o-lantern on the porch, red hearts everywhere, a heel-clicking leprechaun leaping over a fat turkey on the front window, etc. etc. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Are there any Surf Reporters in the Burbank area? Can you tell me if that house is still running wide-open on the holidays? Crazy, man.
Further Evidence that the readers of this site are the greatest:
Yesterday I asked if anyone had an mp3 copy of Sunday’s Art Bell show, featuring a freaky-deaky time travel man. And within a couple of hours, I had the entire program on my iPod. Thanks Jerry!
And I also mentioned that I wouldn’t mind a little StumbleUpon action on our new Sport Figures With Filthy Names feature. Now I’m receiving crazy traffic, insane traffic — from StumbleUpon.
So, thanks folks! You guys are the best.
Aging Hipster Alert: I just downloaded Emergency Third Rail Power Trip by Rain Parade. Do any of you remember that under-appreciated classic, from the so-called Paisley Underground movement? Great stuff. I’m listening to it, right now. Guitars are jangling all around this bitch.
And check out my new desktop background, right here. Pretty nifty, huh? Can you see the plaid Top Value Stamps elephants in the back of the store? I love that.
And since I brought up my disgraceful housekeeping during the bachelor years, I’d like to ask you guys about that as well.
For a Question of the Day I’m hoping you can tell us about your first place after leaving home, and the grossness therein. I can’t be the only slob, can I? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
And if you were a bit more prissy than I was, tell us about the really disgusting apartments or houses you’ve visited. Describe it for us… paint a word-picture of the filth…
My Atlanta place was pretty bad, but Greensboro was even worse. My brother and I shared an apartment there for a few years, and it’s a wonder we didn’t have rats. We were horrible, with dirty dishes in the sink and greasy pizza boxes everywhere.
Something happened at one point (and I’m unclear on the details) where an impossible funk was unleashed in the kitchen. Its source was rotting food of some sort, and the smell saturated all our Tupperware. Seriously, every piece of plastic in the kitchen took on this horrible stench, and we couldn’t get it to go away. We finally had to toss everything into the dumpster.
God, I can smell it right now…
Somewhere I have a picture of our kitchen at that apartment, with trash piled up three feet above the rim of the can (balanced), and the counters completely covered in dirty dishes. It would make me insane now — fully insane — but back then I didn’t give a crap.
So, if you have anything on your early disgusting apartments, or the household nastiness of others, please tell us about it in the comments.
And I’ll see you guys again tomorrow.
Have a fantastic day!
Filed under: Daily
First, Bitches.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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An old woman died in the apartment below us. She was found a few days later. Now that’s funk!
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Hiya
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The worst apartment I have ever been in belonged to a degenerate bastard I once dated. Him and that place still make my skin crawl. Man, I was a dumb ass.
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Even if they still had the tree up because they were waiting for a soldier or someone in the hospital to come home and have belated Christmas, surely they wouldn’t turn on the lights every night.
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Top 10. I’m so proud.
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The neighbors are probably dead in their house and the tree lights are on a timer. Way to be a concerned part of the community, Mr. Kay.
Funny you should mention Rain Parade. I just got done loading ALL my CDs to iTunes and came across it. I hadn’t played it in years. It’s held up pretty well.
I’m far too embarrassed to describe my own slovenly past. I’m recovered now, though. Of course I do still seem to collect piles of stuff wherever I go. I may need a program.
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I’ve always kept a someone clean living quarters.
My best friend, on the other hand, is a filthy pig. I love him to death, but I could never have him as a roommate. When he first moved to Phx, he had a studio apartment, and I think I might have seen the carpet once. It was strewn with clothes, junk, fast food bags, empty water bottles, and other various trash. It was a funk fest.
He moved to a 2 bedroom with a roommate a few months ago. I went to their place about a month after they moved in, and it looked like they’d been there for a year and never ever cleaned. I don’t get it.
Bless his heart.
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Did you find that photo at the Shorpy Photo Archive website?
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My first apartment was with a roomate, who was the most disgusting person I have ever lived with. We lived together for 2 years, and she never washed or changed her sheets once. And she was quite the slut too, so there were certainly lots of, um, remanants, of past partners. Shudder. One of the grossest things ever was that she was so freaking lazy that she would oftentimes not remove maxipads from her underwear, and would then launder and dry them. Can’t tell you how many times I would open the dryer to find it full of the cottony batting from the fallen apart old maxis. Again, shudder.
There’s your picture, JK.
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My place is pretty bad right now… It’s not smelly or anything, it’s just clutter. I’m bad about the bottles of water… they’re EVERYWHERE.
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oh this is bad, and involves hipsters (bless thier cat loving, lazy, trust funded hearts)…
A friend a few blocks away in Philly had thier water shut off for a week or two about 8 months ago. Two of her dirty male hipster housemates decided it was to far to walk to a working toilet, so they shit in buckets in the basement for the week and then refused to clean it up. it’s still there….
This is the same house that’s borderline infested with mice running around in the kitchen and freegan hippie dumpstered food roting in the fridge. (they go to supermarket dumpsters in the middle of the night and take thier roting food!?)
I swear, when the black plague strikes again it’ll be traced back to this house….
On IPod: Kurt Vile- Freak Train
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Good Afternoon Surf Reporters……
First apartment that came to mind wasn’t mine, but I hung out there a lot. 225 Main Street, Clarion, PA also known as the Hippie House.
4 guys, all Dead heads, and let’s just say general housekeeping was no one’s forte. Cases upon cases of empty beer bottles and cans, pizza boxes, overflowing ashtrays, various brick-a-brack piled to the ceiling in some places.
Right after the Christmas break, someone had used a crockpot to make stew or spaghetti sauce, I’m can’t recollect, but the remnants remained in that covered crock for the rest of the semester. A gray fuzzy mold actually grew so much that is was lifting the lid off the top by the end.
3 of the 4 were all in favor of just pitching it out. The 4th however, protested. See, it was his Mom’s and he had taken it to school on the promise that it would be brought back in the same shape it was in at the beginning.
The offending crockpot was contained in a plastic garbage bag and taken to the local coin-op car wash. 75 cents and a high pressured water hose later, it was a good as it was going to get.
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The worst I’ve seen was a good friend of mine. His kitchen was piled high with junk he’d purchased at auction. I remember specifically a mountain of metal cans containing magnetic tape. It was used ‘computer tape’, and my friend figured he could build a jig to slice the tape precisely down the center and then it would be the right width for his 4-track cassette recorder (he was a musician). A prior roommate had punctured a coolant line in the refrigerator when chipping at ice to defrost it, so he didn’t use the kitchen. He went down to the local Quik Trip to eat microwave food! He slept on a mattress on the floor, and I remember once going into the bathroom (aaaaaagh!). Don’t know when the toilet last worked (he went to Quik Trip for THAT, too)! He knew all the employees at Quik Trip really well.
Good guy, but what a slob!
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Decorations:
I’m the Godless atheist of the group and even I know that Christmas decorations should come down by the Epiphany, which is January 6th in most of the civilized world.
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My encounter with gross living wasn’t really the fault of the tenants of the apartment in question, but rather the fault of the landlord. This was about 25 years ago when I was in grad school, and painting houses to make a living. A fellow housepainter (who was a full-timer, not a student) lived in a poor part of town because, obviously, housepainters aren’t exactly the wealthiest people around. This guy lived in an apartment with his wife and two young kids. One day after work, the two of us went out drinking (a common pastime for housepainters), and after a couple of hours at a bar he invited me to his place to have a few more beers. But he warned me that his apartment building had a bit of a cockroach problem. I said I didn’t care, I’d be happy to stop in and have a beer and meet his family. Well, “a cockroach problem” turned about to be a tremendous understatement. The place was overrun with the creatures, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that there was a cockroach about every three square inches, including the floors, walls, ceilings, and furniture. There must have literally been tens of thousands of them in that small apartment. There were even cockroaches crawling on the two kids, including on their faces, and the kids made no attempts to wipe them away, because apparently they had come to realize it was futile — another one would’ve appeared as soon as one was wiped off. The guy’s wife was embarrassed that he had brought me over, given the state of things in the apartment. But I told her not to worry, that I understood, it wasn’t their fault. But after having one quick beer, I thanked them for their hospitality and got out of there as quickly as I could.
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Right after college I moved to the smelly hippie part of Kansas City and got an apartment with my best friend. We were going to be famous comedy writers. We worked at shitty jobs, wrote a little bit and drank beer almost constantly. The place was covered in newspapers and general trash.
I was once drunk and decided that I was pissed that I could not recline my head far back enough when I sat on the couch. The obvious answer to this was to get a hammer and make a headhole in the wall. One other time I was drunk again and decided that we weren’t getting enough writing done so I pushed the couch down two flights of stairs and threw it on its end into the dumpster. There was a thick trail of junk that emitted from the couch. You could follow it all the way from our door to the dumpster.
I later became the guy that shut down houses when they were too nasty for habitation, so I’ve seen worse – for example, people who were afraid that the government was trying to capture their waste who had been “going” in coffee cans for decades. Hopefully sooner than later, you’re going to be able to buy the book…literally.
Anyway, no Jeff, you’re not alone.
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Swami – ever seen that movie “Joe’s Apartment”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk97Oil2qnc
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The joke is midly amusing but it will graduate to hilarious in a few hours when I get back from Liquid Lunch Tuesday.
About a half hour ago , while out and about, we passed a house that still had a lit up tree in their living room and we talked about how assy that is. On the way back home we passed the same house and there was a kid running around a rusty tractor being chased by a chicken. I’m sure there’s a connection.
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First apartment wasn’t such a mess, as it was unique. I had stolen a lot of lawn ornamnet shiny glass balls (the one’s as big as a beachball) off of their pedestals and had them hanging around the place on hooks. Smashed them all in a drunken frenzy one night. Also stole a plastic light-up Santa from a lawn and kept him sitting in a chair in the aprtment. Smashed his plastic head for staring at me too long one night. Also kept stealing the Rax Roast Beef clock from the restaurant. Each time the batteries wore out, I just went back to Rax and stole their newer one.
The aprtment was on the second floor and it was four rooms in a straight line. Livingroom, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Had a waterbed in the bedroom that eventually crashed through to the apartment underneath. I left with no forwarding address.
I had friends (let’s call them Bob and Diana, since their names were Bob and Diana) that had a basement which had a dirt floor. There was never a floor put in when the house was built. Worms, ants roaches, etc., but the dirt basement was the party room of the house. When it rained a lot, it was a soggy mudlike substance. I looked on Street View maps and it is unbelievably still standing.
On IPOD right now- “Alex Chilton”- The Replacements
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My first apartment was in Clarion too, and I kept it pretty immaculate. The trend would have continued had I not met my husband. He’s on the other side of the neat/slobby coin. Today we’ve reached a happy medium of some slobbiness, some neatness. Makes us both less insane to do it that way.
He’s not entirely to blame for his disorganization. He comes from a household full of hoarders, like the ones you see in television shows. Currently one of his immediate family members has a house packed to the brim with junk, with burrows running between all the crap. He is pathologically unable to throw ANYTHING away. We haven’t seen the walls in years. The plumbing is all shot to shit, but can’t be fixed as you can’t get to it. And the kitchen and bathrooms are so nightmarish that if I describe them I’ll likely set off everyone’s gag reflex. It’s a serious mental illness.
I also once briefly dated a fellow who [before I met him] got in some sort of contest with his roommate about who could hold out the longest against cleaning up all the dog shit in their apartment. Apparently they never let the dog out but just let him do his thing right there on the floors, and they each lived amongst the piles of towering crap acting as if nothing was wrong. The contest ended in a draw when the landlord let himself into the apartment one fine day after some “leakage” noted by the downstairs neighbors. He promptly evicted them.
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My first “apartment” was more communal. There were 30 of us living there and we actually had one dust bunny under a bed!!!!!! We ended up running for hours because of that little bastard!
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I used to do court supervised visitation and homemaker services and let me tell you I saw some gross homes. I cannot believe anyone could live in that kind of filth.
I was pretty gross as a teen and left food under my bed and such but every since i was in my own place i have been clean.
Dated a guy in college (he was in college not me) he lived with 6 other guys in a big old house. that place gave me the creeps so bad that i went down early one weekend and cleaned it really well. They came home and none of them realized what color the stove was supposed to be. Seems it was white once all the dried food was removed. Went to visit the next time and you could not tell i had done any cleaning at all. They would get up and swish the beer cans around in the morning and if there was not a cigarette butt in it then it was considered good. Disgusting.
Swami- that is exactly the type of thing i saw as a case manager. I quit 6 months in. i could not do it.
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Worst Apartments:
I work in property management, specifically non-profit housing, so I’ve got some sweet stories. I’ll even send a few pics to Jeff, he can decide if they’re Surf Report worthy.
1. At a 3 story condominium complex we manage, the owners of a third floor unit rented it out to a nurse. Turns out she had mental health issues. Neighbours began complaining about a bad smell. We told the owners, but they did nothing. Before we could take them to court, the tenant goes away for a couple of weeks during the Christmas holidays leaving her patio door open so her 7 cats (yes, 7) could go out on the balcony. She also turned the heat off, since she wasn’t going to be home. While she was gone the pipes froze. Then there was a couple of warm days and they thawed. Water flooded the apartment, which was filled with 100′s of pounds of used cat litter. Then the pissy/shitty water rained on the two units below and flooded out into the halls.
Damage:
-Hotel stay for 5 people for 5 months
-Replace all hallway carpets (3 floors)
-Replace all unit interiors (drywall, cabinets, fixtures, flooring) in three units.
-Replace sub floors in 3 units (concrete)
All in all the damage was over $500,000. Insurance would not cover ~$150,000 of it, so the owners of the unit were on the hook. They lost their house, and had to move into the refurbished condo. For some reason they found the building atmosphere hostile and later sold the unit for a loss.
2. I had a tenant who had her hydro shut off for non-payment. She didn’t know what to do, so she started using her kitchen sink as a barbecue, and the trim from the unit as fuel. Total damage from smoke and replacing trim: $26,000. While the tenant is responsible for the damage she is now institutionalized and will likely never be able to repay any of it.
3. Had a family living in a town house a few years ago. The people were fucking pigs. When they moved out we had to rake the house out. Filled a 20 yard dumpster with garbage from their unit. Bonus: Used tampon applicators in the bedrooms and livingroom.
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Explosions in the Glass Palace EP and Crashing Dream by the Rain Parade are also good. Emergency Third Rail I like best, however.
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I had a some friends who had 13 cats in their house. Not cute little kitties either but huge long-haired white cats. I would come out of their house looking like I was wearing a fur coat. And the funk was something else, especially during a humid Ohio Valley summer.
Now I keep my place clean but at one time I lived in a tiny apartment and it was eventually declared a Superfund site. I feel ashamed about it. Not really.
My former BIL who is now dead would keep everything, even empty Pringles cans. Hundreds of them. Closets and even under the beds and furniture was stuffed with old magazines. After he died my sister carried bags and boxes of crap out of the house for a week.
I see those TV shows about hoarders and I wonder where all those people come from…there seem to be lots of them.
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Last week my GF and I went to house in the DFW area to buy a Lay-z-boy chair off of CL (last week in Jan). It looks ed ok in the pics so we thought is would be ok. We pull up to the house (decent area of town) and we notice the xmas tree is still up, and lit. Great. Then notice the solor powered hanging xmas lights along the walkway. We then noitce that there is crap everywhere, hoarders. The lady says she 3-4 monthe preggo and cannot help move the chair. Whatever. We then notice the halloween candy is still out. She keep mentioning grandma, now we think she is mumified in the back room under a pile of junk. The chair is actually nice and we get it. She then tells us she is 5 monthe preggo (she did not look it at all). That place was scary.
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In my former life, when I was going through my divorce, and hadn’t learned xcel well enough to become a fat secretary, I supplemented my income by cleaning houses. One was a super-clean freak, and I would basically just go over what she had done (she could tell if I skipped anything), but I had two others that I could only stand to do a few times before I quit-they were beyond disgusting, shit all over the bathrooms, cigarette butts everywhere, food encrusted throughout, etc. What made me feel so bad about quitting was that both of these clients had small children, and I felt terrible that they were living in that environment. But even $30.00 an hour was not enough for me-I just couldn’t face it week after week (seven days later it would look like I had never been there).
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You’ve all got me so sad (perhaps moist would better describe it) – having lived such a sheltered, pampered life, I’m not exposed to this first hand or even second hand. Sure, you see it on Hoarders but you folks have lived this (and thanks for sharing).
My story pales so much in comparison – I had three buddies in college that shared an apartment. They had a stack of Pizza boxes as an end table. And, in a nod to both topics, they also kept a Christmas tree up so long they decorated it for the next Halloween.
To be fair to them though, I saw more roaches in my own apartment years later. Nothing crazy that one spray didn’t take care of but still enough to give the full body shivers…
Hey here’s a visual – to use the toilet, you would sit with one hand above your head holding a frying pan lid upside down to catch the drips while they were fixing the roof.
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Neighbour in the same apartment was Jabba the Hut with cigars.. he would sit with the door open so you could walk by and see him in all his shirtless glory as he lumped away on the couch… and did I mention the cigars? oh yes…
but
He made up for it with his charming (freakin abusive) personality (reason for death).
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I used to live in a giant delapidated mansion called the White House in Tallahassee. Rumor has it Jim Morrison lived there, but that wasn’t enough to deter me. 6 or 10 people lived there and the kitchen was nasty. One day the roommates came home to find all the dishes broken on the floor and all the knives stabbed into the linoleum.
-That guy moved out.
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I’m OCD about my house and sweep, mop vacum & dust 2-3 times a week. Can’t help it, just gotta do it.
However after college I was working for a finance company doing collections. Yes I know bu tshit it was WV and I had to have a job, and I was damn good at it.. I had just changed companies and was working for a finance company and went out to “chase” an account. It’s wher eyou go knocking on the door to get the payment they are late on.
This patricular loan was for windows for a home. So I went to this house that faced the railroad tracks right by Kmart at Patrick Street. I had to step over the holes in the steps and on the porch to get to the door. you could look straight down and see the ground. When I got inside the house was floor was the same way. The house let’s just say I wouldn’t sit down.
These people couldn’t be bothered to mail in their payment so everymonth I had to go collect the payment. Once their daughter had moved back in with them and while I was ther eI noticed a baby in a box in the corner. I went home and got my daughters playpen and gave it to them. They had lots of animals and that poor baby.
Rememer I was collecting on $10,000 in new windows for this house. The windows were worth more than the house!!
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I just cringed.
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Juancho –
I am quite familiar with the White House (which has apparently been torn down). Over the years that I frequented that address, it alternated between a well-kept state and a filthy flop-house. Depended on the group of occupants at any given time. Jim Morrison never lived there in his two-year stint at FSU. He lived downtown somewhere.
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I used to do electrical service work so I saw everything.
Bad: Hoarders. When you only have a path through your house through all of the junk it’s time for mental help…
Badder: people with pets. do they not understand how bad they smell? it also doesn’t help when you don’t clean up the puke and the poop. I had a few that I refused to go back into just because of the smell.
Worse: Trying to fix a problem that required me to go into the basement but was warned by the tenant that I wouldn’t want to go down there. Seems that part of town had sewer and storm water in the same pipes and the floor drain had backed up leaving about 6″ of raw sewage in the basement. I picked up my tools, went back and told the boss what was going on. He said it couldn’t be as bad as I described it so we went back to the house where he wouldn’t even go down the stairs because of the smell.
Just the thought of how these people live make me want to clean my house…..
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My dorm at Georgia Tech was my first non-home living space. It was a disaster. We literally had a pizza box tower about 6 feet high.
My first post-college place was literally in a roach motel – $90 per week, and disgusting. I used to leave double-sided tape by the sink overnight, and in the morning, it would be covered in stuck roaches. If I left them long enough, a pregnant female would give birth on the tape. Horrifying. I lived next to a drunken screaming retard, and two floors below a Haitian guy who once attacked me for no reason. Good times…
Joe
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Wow. I can’t believe some of the stories! YIKES!
Alls I got is the fact that I used to leave “science projects” in Tupperware in my fridge when I was young. I could never bring myself to open them, so I threw the whole thing out. I went through a lot of Tupperware back then.
Happy Tuesday, Surfers!
Definitely coming back later to check out more of these self-esteem building stories!
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Lee Harvey- I know, but you aren’t supposed to tell everybody! Sometimes I switched it to “Burt Reynolds lived here.”
Now there is a Subway, and I don’t mean underground conveyance.
If you want to compare notes contact me through my blog. (What? I said it.)
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I moved in with a hoarder in Reseda, LA in my early college years. She was the alcoholic (strictly box wine, keeping the theme) single mother of my best friend. $250/mo included everything. The tour started in the back yard. A 20 x40 concrete pad strewn with dog feces and dead leaves.
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I moved out to a friends house at the ripe age of 18. This house had literally not been cleaned since God was a boy. Cats…they were allowed to shit everywhere…I remember a time when someone(me) noted the funk of cat shit behind the entertainment center and recieved nothing but dumb vacant looks. Because..duh it was back there and who goes behind that?? hmm. Cats also led to a summer infestation of fleas. Had to have flea spray for ankles and feet just to be in the house. I cleaned the funk off the tub with a mixture of diesel fuel, bleach and some other stuff. The fumes almost killed us all, but hot damn that tub was white!!
Funny what you put up with for freedom when you are young. Now I clean my Mother in laws mansion, that is my JOB…and I do it well
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That Rain Parade LP is one of my favorites. Let me echo what Matt in Florence said: get a copy of the “Explosions in the Glass Palace” ep as soon as you can. I think Dave Roeback was one of the great underappreciated songwriters of the 80s. I loved so much of that west coast stuff that was going on at that time – Green On Red, Dream Syndicate, The Three O’Clock (and their 1st LP as Salvation Army), Thin White Rope, The Pontiac Brothers, The Mongrel Puppy…
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Damn. Submitted by mistake…
Anyway, as the lady of the house was making grand gestures regarding the yard’s potential, I looked down at her gnarly, bare feet, only to notice a semi-fresh turd rising from between her toes. She picked up on my contorted expression, looked down and exclaimed “oh angel…where’s my baby! It was at that point I realized that this woman had the potential to provide me with stories for life. Six months later, I had a bit of a breakdown and found myself on the back porch sobbing like a reality show star. As I listened through the doggie flap, to ‘Angel’ cleaning the pots and plates from dinner, generously placed on the floor by momma, I realized that I was no john waters, and I had collected enough stories to last me. The image of momma’s obese profile shuffling past the picture window, morning sunlight cutting through her sheer nightie has forever ruined my morning bowl of cereal.
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The first place I lived was with a roommate who kept me in line with forced cleanings on Saturday’s.
Next place I was on my own but I had a girlfriend who stayed over quite a bit so I always kept it nice.
I finally bought a house and have been there ever since, used to keep it spic and span but it has gradually degraded over the years. No cockroaches or vermin just very untidy although I do keep the kitchen disinfected. I can’t handle moldy things so I keep up on that kind of stuff. Baffroom, that could be from the Animal House set. I don’t get nor welcome a lot of visitors.
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My oldest brother was one of those Hoarders. After he had a stroke and lapsed into a coma in Jan. of ’08 I went down to VA to help out. I had to stay in that hellhole of a house!
Cleaning?…..he didn’t know the definition of the word. After my mother, who lived with him, died in 2000 that house never saw another broom or vacuum cleaner. He hadn’t fixed anything in the house in 15 years…hole in the kitchen floor, sink didn’t drain,washer backed up into sink that didn’t drain, toilet cracked, couldn’t turn the water on in the bathroom sink, still had a broken dryer in the hallway closet that hadn’t worked in over 10 yrs., 2 bedrooms piled to the celing with junk and bike parts(he rebuilt bikes on the side for cash), his unneutered cats crapped and peed everywhere and gave birth whereever(I found lots of little kitten corpses), falling down sheds out back filled til you couldn’t close the doors, the ceiling was filled with broken shit too and more bike parts. He rented a HUGE storage unit too….Sis-IL and I tracked it down and it was 25′ wide by 50′ deep by 15′ tall or thereabouts….anyway, it was filled with bikes he had bought over the yrs. at police auction and never fixed….a mangled jumbled mass of bikes stacked 9 ft. tall! We filled 2 U-Hauls with bikes and took them to the scrap metal yard and it didn’t look like we had made a dent in it!!
He also had a broken down Ford truck he left at the hardware store he worked at and kept junk in that there. Plus his car was a mobile storage unit for more crap….the trunk, backseat and passenger side seat all piled 4 ft. high with crap!
We spent almost a yr. off and on cleaning out his house, filling many roll-off containers. Sis-IL and other brother held a yard sale and got rid of alot summer before last. When Sis-IL tried to get Goodwill to pick up what didn’t sell we found out that comatose Brother wasn’t the BAD one in the family….other brother was worse! He was secretly taking stuff from Brother’s house and putting it all into his and Sis-IL’s house….filling up the 3 ar garage, his office and the apartment over the garage. Plus he still has all the shit he wouldn’t let Goodwill take sitting in comatose brother’s house.
It’s a very disturbing illness. I have to stay vigilant as I have that hoarding gene too. I’ve yet to get that nasty or sick and DH has orders to shot me if I ever do.lol
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There’s a house at 2133 N. Hollywood Way in Burbank that seems to be adorned with xmas decorations (Google Maps and/or Google Earth / Street View). There’s no way to know what season it is (I even looked for pedestrians to see how they were dressed, but got nothing. “Nobody walks in L.A…”), so it can’t be said for sure that the decorations are inappropriate. None of the other post-war box houses on Hollywood Way are decorated, though…so I think the house is still “problematic.”
And Google’s as close as I’m going to get to that house. It’s over 50 miles from The OC to Burbank, straight up the madness that is I-5. No thanks.
I don’t have anything to add to the horrific housing stories. Apparently there’s a lot of sick shit going on out there–I’ll just crawl back behind the Orange Curtain and hide from reality, thankyouverymuch.
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Had a friend in High School who was so great! But she lived in a squalid dump! Her “parents” were divorced, she lived with her dad and younger brother. Her dad was never there, and they had animals out the yahoo, the whole house reeked of cat & dog shit and the kitchen was piled to the ceiling with dirty dishes. You would have never know how they lived if not going in and seeing it for yourself. Soo sad. They had huge printing presses in dining room piled up with stuff? Have no idea why. You had to go next door to Her sister and B-I-L’s to use the bathroom and they had an engine block on the kitchen table. WTH? Their house wasn’t as gross but it was still pretty bad. I hope to never experience that kinda living space ever again.
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At the ripe old age of 22 (41 now) I bought what I thought was the world’s greatest deal….. My first house, a 4 unit apartment building in Wilkes Barre, Pa (aka, asshole of the known universe)……. for 40 grand! Wotta deal!
For the next 12 years I received a harsh lesson on human filth, debauchery and other such fun things.
Had one tenant I evicted, a bisexual / alcoholic / addict that was 24 or so, he said I could have the area rug in the kitchen as he didn’t need it. It felt a little too lumpy when I walked on it, so I lifted it to discover a month’s savings of cat shit, a pile here, a pile there…….. apparently kitty litter cuts into the beer fund. Hmmpf.
Had one dude never let his large dog out of a 6 x 6 foot kitchen area…… hardwood floor with carpet over it. Yeah, gotta love wood soaked with a thousand gallons of dog piss. Yum.
I lived with a an alcoholic for awhile, and those folks set the fukkin’ bar pretty high for slobbiness. One of her few houshold chores was to empty the wastebaskets, including the bathroom one……. Yeah, well, she never did, and I refused to do it for her. She also had no real code of honor when it came to disposing of tampons. No wrapping them with toilet paper, oh no, they were flung right on top of whatever was in the waste can. Eventually, the can became a mountain O’ tampons. Like a bizarre scab sculpture to comptemplate rather than read on the throne.
“Hey!” I’d think. “That looks sorta like a horse……. and that looks like a………”
I solved the problem by booting her to the curb. Good riddance.
I’m a slob myself, but hell, we all have limits…….
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Ah Rain Parade! I’d forgotten about them but can’t wait to dig up those old CDs! Thanks for reminding me!
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I’m a firefighter so I get to see some pretty horrendous places from time to time. Undoubtedly the worst was a house where a woman with a mental problem lived…..with her 25 cats and 16 dogs. There was a fire there and you could only walk single file through the place. Rubbish discarded around the house to WAIST level. Not joking. The only flat surfaces you could see were piled with dog or cat shit and the only floor you could see were the paths kept from room to room between the trash. It’s amazing she got out alive. Then, get this, she asked us if we thought there would be much damage!!!! Truely disgusting, this place. I still have shivers when I think about it. I felt sorry for the neighbours. They had been trying to get the place cleaned by local council for years.
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Personally, I’ve always been facinated by the haording sickness. Paper products and animals always seem to be a common denominator. What interests me most is the visceral anger that wells up when I witness the complacent excuses and unsubstantiated stubbornness of the typical hoarder. And can there be a more appropriate name for this sickness? I have perfected a gutteral projection, with a faint mist of spittle on my lower lip. My kind and loving wife of 20 years is a hoarder.
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I knew this topic would bring out the hoarding stories! Glad to see I’m not alone. There’s a difference between pack rats and hoarders, by the way. If the ceiling-high towers of crap piled several feet out from the walls doesn’t clue you in, try throwing something of theirs out. Something innocuous, like a plastic lid from a McDonald’s cup, a used tissue, an envelope. Something that registers as trash to a normal person. Try it, I double dog dare ya. Hoarders go six different ways of crazy if you touch their stuff, much less throw it out. If you throw it out it’s a grievous crime against their very soul and you will never be forgiven. Oh yes, hoarders hoard grudges too.
Slugmama: We’re looking forward to finding the secret off site storage units too. Good luck dealing with your other brother.
To all utility peeps: A meter man once told me of some of the crazy things he’s seen in people’s houses. One thing he mentioned were weird “shrines”, I guess to dead kin, famous people, and Lord Jeebus. He didn’t elaborate. I don’t mean to distract from the topic at hand so much as to expand it. Any utility people out there see crazy shrines like that?
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just logged in and all I can say is: AUUUUUUGH! AUUUUUGH! AUUUUUUGH! Trip Advisor just released their annual World’s filthiest hotels(with pictures!) Scarier than the filter in the Kardashian hot tub!
Gretchen years ago thw wife and I scraped together a downpayment & went naively looking for a “starter home” Real Estate agent took us out to a very scary place (Scarborough, Ontario) & showed us what turned out to be a very nice 3 bedroom bungalow we were seriously interested when she added it also has a fully finished Basement “but you might not fully appreciate the decor” Bonus!! we thought as we headed downstairs into a huge single room with Bright red walls and a giant freakin Black Swastika dead in the centre! I wonder why we didn’t buy the place!
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Pagan: HOLY CRAP!!!
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when was kid mom had job interviewing poor people for home improvemts, at gov expense
the aroma from the goats living under house was overpowered by the stench from the 6 or 8 nude unhousetrained children,some were midgets or growth stunted,
obvously the house had no running water by entire famly unwashed aperance
the walls has original 3d moving wallpaper in the dancing roach pattern.
as a 14 yr kid i was amazed
yrs later was discussing them wirh phone dude
he had just came from their house
phone was not ringing
so he opened the phone up
was old type[in 70's] with bells and hammer inside
the bells were packed full with crushed roaches that were muffeling sound
then today buddy was telling about he dropped in on friend, who was not known as good housekeeper
his friend was very amature taxidermest, VERY AMATURE
was scraping fat off inside rancid deer hide,so rancid hair was falling out everywhere, on kitchen table
my buddy was gagging, and trying to get out without being rude
just then neighbor drops in and gets cup of coffee and sits on other end of table like nothing wrong
buddy barely made it to door before vomiting on porch
he just left
figgured out that they not notice it and hounds would clean up for him
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Gretchen said….Slugmama: We’re looking forward to finding the secret off site storage units too. Good luck dealing with your other brother.
Thanks Gretchen, but I won’t be dealing with the other brother. I don’t live in that state and he’s married, so the wifey will have to clean up his shit when he kicks. The only things I want are the family land and the grandfather clock which mom’s will let him keep until he kicks and then it goes to my kids(since he has none). All the rest of it can go into the massive garage sale Sis-IL will have!
He’s a hoarder but not typical. He doesn’t keep literal trash, he only keeps things with merit….things you could sell or give away so you have the piles and pathways but not the mold and infestations. Sounds more packrat but it’s past that into hoarding. He has boxes of clothes he wore in college…he’s now 57. Obviously he’ll never be able to wear 1960′s hot pants with a 28″ waist again.lol
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Dog shit on the rug
Pizza boxes stacked askew
Winter closes in
.
Cockroaches parade
Across the green moss kitchen
Marching toward our lunch
.
In the dark cellar
Vermin consume detritus
Smacking their wee lips
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Cold winter kitchen
Ants in the pressure cooker
Spectacles on rice
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Pagan: Funny you should mention the list of the world’s filthiest hotels….
…A few years back a bunch of us piled into a friend’s van and went to a bike show in Columbus, OH. He assured us that the Knight’s Inn, where he made our reservations, was a nice place as he had stayed there the year before. Little did we know the change of ownership went to Indians (dot not feather).
There were 8 of us…reserved 4 rooms. We got there, they oversold 2 rooms…so we had bunkies. Fine. We walk into the room and all gasped. R U SERIOUS??? The carpet was circa 1955, and looked to have never been cleaned. EVER. The lamp shades looked like they were used for target practice…bullet holes through out. They were also a nice shade of yellow from all the previous cigarette smoke. NO drawer fronts on the dresser…just open air storage. The drapes and shower curtain were suspended with all of the following and in no particular order: Elastic hair bands, safety pins, mop string, zip ties.
The bathroom had not been cleaned from the last “guest” as there were still used shampoo bottles, soap and bobbypins (??) all over the place. The place was so gross we refused to even pull the covers off the bed. So we slept in our clothes. There was one pillow for two beds. We opted to use our coats for pillows.
CSI should go in to take samples for a crime scene. We now affectionately refer to it as The Cat Scratch Inn.
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This brings on memories of an apartment I share with a few biker friends in FL. Kitchen table took apart and placed against wall to make room for assembling a harley-davidson. At one time there was a Sportster engine in the bathtub.
Endtables were each two cases (empty bottles, of course!) of long-neck budweisers; coffe table was the same, a door resting on empty cases of bud.
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We live in Charlotte. About 12 years ago, we lived in an apartment that was quite nice, no complaints for almost two years. Then, about three months after our first Secret was born, ants moved in. Small ants, but millions of them. We kept seeing them in the strangest places – our kitchen (which we kept clean, no food out), making long lines up door jambs, even inside the water reservoir of our frickin IRON. How bad does an infestation have to be, if they’re in your iron? Apartment maintenance did little to help us, and the ants persisted. The final straw was seeing ants in the baby’s crib, concentrated in one small patch where he had spit up – it was apparently a big feast for these ants.
Finally, after long assuming we were the Culprits of Filth, the management investigated the apartment next door. Lo! Twas THAT filthy woman, with a kitchen counter covered in plates of uneaten food, just rotting away, covered in ants. (The food, not the woman, dead in her apartment. Though I might have been more understanding if that were the case.) You’ve seen episodes of Intervention or Hoarders? It was something like that. Apparently she was a flight attendant and was gone for days at a time, leaving her stinking pit of ordure unattended.
The ants could not be eliminated, and we were forced to move to another place altogether. Ah well.
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Also, since Pagan was kind enough to report that Trip Advisor’s list of Dirtiest hotels is out, here is a link, because reviews are always enjoyable…
http://www.tripadvisor.com/DirtyHotels
Such as this from a hotel in San Francisco:
“The rooms are grubby to say the least. As I type there are some questionable brown mud-esque marks on the bedroom chairs, grubby fingerprints all over the curtains, the TV has the power button missing and can only be turned on if we poke a door key into the hole and the traffic can be heard quite clearly through the poorly fitted secondary glazing.”
Love that he’s sitting there IN the squalid room, observing all and writing it down for the rest of us. Had to be a Surf Reporter.
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Erica: You taught me a new word today — ordure. And it’s a good one. Thank you.
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I was compelled to Google “odure”….and that just never leads to anything good:
http://ask.bmezine.com/2009/10/18/bad-odure-after-scrotal-piercing/
HURL
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Erica’s word is different, Gretchen, it has an “r” after the “o”. Ordure.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ordure
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My first apartment was when I first left home to attend Marshall, and my roommates and I had a place with wall-to-wall brown shag carpet. The carpet was even in the bathroom! (Ewww). Anyway, I was getting out of the shower one night when I noticed that a mushroom, yes a MUSHROOM, had sprouted out of the carpet along the bathtub. Mmmmmmmm…..Come to think of it, I should’ve eaten it. We were going out that night;)
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..
I went to college at Marshall back in the 80′s. I used to share a house with 4 or 5 other students at any given time.
The place was on 6th Ave at the site of the current Speedway two blocks from the “new” library.
Anyhow, I came upon the place through my side job doing construction work. The owner lived in Lexington, KY and he agreed to rent me and another guy the place if we would not require him to do any. maintainence. whatsoever.
So, for $500 /month we subletted to three other guys who basically covered all the rent ( Me and my buddy lived rent free !! ) but we all shared the power bill etc.
The entire house was a fire trap and the Fire Marshall had condemned the third floor for human habitation. The walls in the kitchen were separating from the floor ( sill ) and you could look through the 2″ crack and see outside.
Anyhow, we had a BAD rat problem. BAD. Once one of my roomates cooked up a bunch of pasta and sauce and put it in the fridge. Next day after class he goes and opens up the fridge and a huge Norwegian Rat leaped out of the fridge and bit him on the inner thigh.
We decided we had had enough and went to war. I went to the hardware store and bought some of those big rat traps ( probably 10-12 or so ), baited them with government cheese ( yum ) put them in the kitchen, turned off the lights and waited.
We didn’t have to wait long. I sat in the adjoining living room and over the span of about 10 minutes I heard the traps going off, one by one.
I went over and turned on the kitchen light and laid on the floor before me at various strategic locations were dead rats. BIG RATS, Rats big enough to do battle with any cat or small dog.
Anyhow, I moved out the next semester. My girlfriend at the time refused to visit me there and I got tired of having to stay at her house if I wanted to sleep with her….
..
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Swami: Aw crap! So I read all that grossness (and shared it) for nothin’. Thanks for the correction.
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My younger brother used to shuck and jive for money, he’s never had a proper job. He’d take on small remodeling projects and then use these two Mexican guys to do the actual work. I don’t know how to spell their names but they were pronounced “she-oh” and “schety”. They called themselves cowboys but had no legitimate reason for the title. They didn’t have horses or even boots. But I guess “cowboys” sounded better than “gay Mexican jacks-of-all-trades that would work for next to nothing”, so whatever.
My brother and I went to their house one afternoon to drink beers and the whole way over he was telling me what slobs they were and to look for this and that. Looking back, I’m glad I had him to explain some of the weird shit I saw.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. There weren’t any pets so I have no idea what caused it. It smelled like taco meat and sharp underarm odor. There was an ironing board in the kitchen. They didn’t have an iron so they’d heat a skillet on the nearby stovetop and use that to iron their skin-tight camo t-shirts and jeans (their favorite uniform). Their bed was a pool table with a matress thrown atop it. They’d started to shorten it by sawing the legs off but apparently decided the huge ass legs were too hard to saw through with a fucking hand saw so there was only one shortened leg, cinder blocks and a couple of books kept things level.
The bathroom was perhaps the best part. There was a garbage bag full of underwear sitting beside the toilet. I stood there pissing and thought about how odd it was to have a trash bag full of used underwear laying in the bathroom. Then I looked in the tub and saw dozens of underwear laying in there with shit stains all over them. They’d wipe their asses with the used underwear and then toss them in the tub (the tub was dry, mind you. They used it as a trash can). Apparently they could buy bags of underwear from Goodwill for less than the cost of toilet tissue, that’s the best I could come up with.
They showed me their deep freezer and I jerked away, but not before seeing a small goat laying in there with its hair and everything else intact. They’d taken the guts out and then froze the whole damn thing. I have no idea.
There was a tractor tire hanging from the ceiling in one of the bedrooms. There was nothing else in the room. My guess is that it was a gay sex swing of sorts.
There was a third guy there and he didn’t say shit the whole time we were there. He just sat there on a bean bag, nodding off. I think he was stoned. He had a huge softball sized sore/hole on his thigh. When I saw it I puked in the kitchen trash can, which turned out to be their clothes hamper instead of a trash can (sitting there waiting to be ironed with a skillet, I guess).
That place was a fucking nightmare. I’ve not seen anything like it since.
We got to bring the new baby boy home today. He’s doing great.
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